Messages

Cain, absolutely. I just say I find myself agreeing more often with utilitarianism than Kantianism.

Guy Incognito, the textbook example against utilitarianism:

scenario A
you're in charge of a railroad switch. due to an error somewhere, the train is about to go into a mountain tunnel where 5 people are working on the ventilation somethings and if the train goes there, they will all get smashed and die. you could throw the switch to save them and the train will take a different route. except it's really not your day because that route also goes to a mountain tunnel where 1 guy is working.

so your choice is, should I do nothing and let 5 people die, or should I throw the switch and let 1 person die?

utlitarianism says throw the switch and let 1 person die.

scenario B
you're a doctor in a hospital and you are treating 1 person with a appendectomy. he is still asleep under narcosis but he will be fine. while treating him you happen to find out he has a very rare bloodtype. that night, it's really not your night, because 5 people come in and they all suffer from severe blood loss from a shoggoth attack. they need blood transfusion or they will die. of course (because this is a shitty night remember) these 5 people all have this same very rare bloodtype as your sleeping patient. you can save these 5 people by drawing blood from him, but it will be too much cause he's weakened from the operation and he will die.

so your choice is, should I do nothing and let 5 people die, or should I take action and let 1 person die?

utlitarianism says again to let 1 person die.

--------

i thought utilitarianism also added that you should not feel bad about making that choice.
because it is The Right Thing To Do.

[add a half cup of half and half and a half]

I usually add a half cup of half and half and a half cup of water with some cracked black pepper, finely diced red onion, minced garlic and a wee bit of cilantro.
It works when you don't feel like actually cooking.

...
i cant figure out what it means?

Wow, you really stuck your dick in it!

?

nice.

sound quality is good enough.
for the rest i second what trip said.

One wrong U-turn and they all go in the drink.

Please.

I can't find any reports of us losing Navy ships in battle for several decades.  Either its classified (not sure how you could keep a secret like that though) or what.  Still, the US Navy isn't known for its heavy casualties.

This is about the pointlessness of walls, though.  Walls do not keep airplanes, artillery, tanks, or even soldiers at bay.

So what's the big shit over walls?

It's not about walls exactly, its about the right to build a wall.
you haven't bought that right from your king, so you don't have a city.

An extraterrestrial robot and spaceship has just landed on earth. The robot steps out of the spaceship...]

"I come in peace," it said, adding after a long moment of further grinding, "take me to your Lizard."

Ford Prefect, of course, had an explanation for this, as he sat with Arthur and watched the nonstop frenetic news reports on television, none of which had anything to say other than to record that the thing had done this amount of damage which was valued at that amount of billions of pounds and had killed this totally other number of people, and then say it again, because the robot was doing nothing more than standing there, swaying very slightly, and emitting short incomprehensible error messages.

"It comes from a very ancient democracy, you see..."

"You mean, it comes from a world of lizards?"

"No," said Ford, who by this time was a little more rational and coherent than he had been, having finally had the coffee forced down him, "nothing so simple. Nothing anything like to straightforward. On its world, the people are people. The leaders are lizards. The people hate the lizards and the lizards rule the people."

"Odd," said Arthur, "I thought you said it was a democracy."

"I did," said ford. "It is."

"So," said Arthur, hoping he wasn't sounding ridiculously obtuse, "why don't the people get rid of the lizards?"

"It honestly doesn't occur to them," said Ford. "They've all got the vote, so they all pretty much assume that the government they've voted in more or less approximates to the government they want."

"You mean they actually vote for the lizards?"

"Oh yes," said Ford with a shrug, "of course."

"But," said Arthur, going for the big one again, "why?"

"Because if they didn't vote for a lizard," said Ford, "the wrong lizard might get in. Got any gin?"

"What?"

"I said," said Ford, with an increasing air of urgency creeping into his voice, "have you got any gin?"

"I'll look. Tell me about the lizards."

Ford shrugged again.

"Some people say that the lizards are the best thing that ever happened to them," he said. "They're completely wrong of course, completely and utterly wrong, but someone's got to say it."

@op: attempt at serious response:

that's not a democracy, that's a representatocracy.
democracy is voting on issues. this is voting on people.


@ everyone else:
it has a point, not a good one, but still a point.
so it is not pineal yet.
let him have his 50 posts before killing him.

WANT

we(humans) produce about a mountain of carbondioxide every year. (if it were made liquid/solid)
how much space did they say there was?

Requia,
are you thinking about it in the way that John Robbs is with his advocating us to 'Tribe Up'?

Do you mean John Robb of the global guerillas blog?  I haven't been able to access it for a couple weeks now.  Hard to check.

How do you manufacture a strong community that protects, defends and advances the interests of its members?  You build a tribe.  Tribal organization is the most survivable of all organizational types and it was the dominant form for 99.99% of human history.  The most important aspect of tribal organization is that it is the organizational cockroach of human history.  It has proven it can withstand the onslaught of the harshest of environments.  Global depression?  No problem.

If you are like most people in the 'developed world,' you don't have any experience in a true tribal organization.  Tribal organizations were crushed in the last couple of Centuries due to pressures from the nation-state that saw them as competitors and the marketplace that saw them as impediments.  All we have now it is a moderately strong nuclear family (weakened via modern economics that forces familial diasporas), a weak extended family, a loose collection of friends (a social circle), a tenuous corporate affiliation, and a tangential relationship with a remote nation-state.  That, for many of us, is proving to be insufficient as a means of withstanding the pressures of the chaotic and harsh modern environment (D2 in particular).

The solution to this problem is to build a tribe.  A group of people that you are loyal to you and you are loyal in return.  In short, the need for a primary loyalty to a group that really cares about your survival and future success. 

So how do you build a tribe?  A strong tribe, in this post-industrial environment*, isn't built from the top down.  Instead it is built organically from the bottom up.  A simple tribe starts with cementing ties to your extended family, a connection of blood.  The second step is to extend that network to include other families and worthy  individuals.  A key part of that is to build fictive kinship, a sense of connectedness that leads to the creation of loyalty to the group.  That kinship is built through (see Ronfeldt's paper for some background on this):

    * Story telling.  Shared histories and historical narratives. 
    * Rites of passage.  Rituals of membership.  Membership is earned not given due to the geographic location of birth or residence.
    * Obligations.   Rules of conduct and honor.  The ultimate penalty being expulsion.
    * Egalitarian and often leaderless organization.  Sharing is prized. 
    * Multi-skilled.  Segmental organization (lots of redundancy among parts).
    * Two-way loyalty.  The tribe protects the members and the members protect the tribe.   If this isn't implemented, you don't have a tribe, you have a Kiwanis club.

The development of fictive kinship will likely be key to the development of resilient communities (as it is already for global guerrillas).  We can already see this process at work in the UK's Transition Towns movement with their story telling, honoring elders, re-skilling, and leaderless approach (see the 12 steps).

*Nationalism is a form of fictive kinship manufactured/bent to serve the needs of the state during our industrial phase of economic organization.

sounds like peedee

what will you do when the highwaymen get organised huh?
or when a foreign power decides to invade?
NOTHING, THATS WHAT!
because you have no city rights you have no city wall or militia to defend your rights.
you are sooooo fucked.




PS
me too btw, my town was built after the crown stopped selling city rights.

co-ops are good.

None of you live in real cities!
(except for 000)
Not one of your 'cities' has bought their city rights from your king!
you have no right to build a wall around you city, or have a militia of your own.
you just live in sad, sad towns.

i've seen several of these in video games.
I THOUGHT THEY WERE FICTIONAL!

damn.
this is gonna be the weirdest decade.

Ok, a quick search shows that wireless energy transfer is indeed possible, and technologies are still being developed.

well duh, its what a lightbulb and a solar panel will do.
the trick is to make it efficient.

[SAFE]

Lasers are for consumer electronics or warfare. SAFE Flying cars require that average spags become pilots, and that very notion is silly.

No, this future is an interconnected network of silicon-based counting machines accessible by anyone who can afford it.

fixed.

screw safe, that is not the point of flying cars.
make em suicidal deathtraps and slap a "enter at own risk" sign on 'em.
oh and make 'em loud as fuck(staple a whistle on the front or something) so only deaf people will be hit by one falling out of the sky.
we wouldn't want our tranportation to end a lot of lives now would we?


Killed in car accidents   42,116*
Killed by the common flu   20,000*
Killed by murders   15,517*
Killed in airline crashes
(of 477m passenger trips)   120 (1)
Killed by lightning strikes   90*
Killed by Anthrax   5
(1) Annual average over 19 year period.
*Average annual totals in United States.